And the Band Played On (25 page)

Was Andrew Hume bad or just mad? The final act in this legal tragedy – or farce – suggests that he was both. Exactly a year to the day after the court in Dumfries found that Jock was the father of Johnann, Andrew Hume filed a ‘Reponing Note’. In Scottish law this is an application to the court to allow someone another chance to defend their case if the Sheriff has already made a decision against them. Hume began an action to have the paternity decision overturned on the grounds that material facts had since come to his attention. His solicitor was again Mr Edgar.

Yet again, Mary Costin found herself crossing the road to the Sheriff Court in Buccleuch Street. Mary’s solicitor Mr Bannerman objected to the application as ‘incompetent’ and suggested that Andrew Hume was using it as a device to reverse the earlier order that he should repay £67 to Mary Costin. In any event, ‘it would be unfair to allow one party to hear the evidence of the other, take a year to think it over and then proceed to hunt up evidence to the contrary’.

Sheriff Campion adjourned the hearing until 12 February 1914, when he issued his ‘interlocutor’. He refused the application on the grounds that Andrew Hume had produced no new evidence or any of his promised ‘material facts’. His excuses for failing to attend the original paternity hearing a year earlier were unconvincing. It would be ‘harsh’ to require Mary Costin to reopen the case after twelve months. For Mary, the legal nightmare was finally over. She could now begin to rebuild her life without Jock.

21

Opening Old Wounds

31 May 1913, Dumfries

The court case between Andrew Hume and Mary Costin caused great distress to the Humes’ youngest daughter, Kate, now aged almost sixteen. It was bad enough to witness the public humiliation of her father, who was branded a liar and a thief. Kate had seen her father’s business as a music teacher fall away and had begun to feel ostracised herself as parents of her school friends discouraged their daughters from having anything to do with the Humes. But perhaps worst of all from Kate’s point of view, the court case prolonged her grieving for Jock, whose death had hit her harder than any of the Hume children. He had been her big brother, her protector.

It wasn’t just the court case bringing back old memories. A year after Jock’s death, it seemed that hardly a month went by without a memorial event honouring the
Titanic
heroes requiring her attendance. Kate Hume had been particularly dreading the last day of May, 1913. She had been dreading it for a year, ever since the idea of a monument had first been suggested. She had already wept her heart out through two memorial services for Jock in the week following the sinking of the
Titanic
and two months later she had stood in pouring rain during the unveiling of a marble plaque at the entrance to his old school, St Michael’s. Now, as she was still struggling to come to terms with her brother’s death, there was to be a new outpouring of public grief.

Each one of the three memorial occasions so far had been painful in its own way. The church services had been packed out with older people, few of whom had known Jock, or Tom Mullin. They had paid tribute to ‘Dumfries’s young heroes’ in a way that made it difficult for Kate to relate to these impersonal demonstrations of grief for her brother. The unveiling of the plaque at the school was quite different and had caught her off guard. It was attended almost entirely by children at the school and many of the boys were the same age as Jock in her earliest memories of him – in short trousers, running across the playground to greet her and her mother when they came to collect him. Although few of the pupils attending the ceremony would have known him, many of the boys were in tears, their youth a poignant reminder to Kate of how much of Jock’s life had been ahead of him. And Jock’s headmaster, Mr Hendrie, a man whose mission in life was the teaching and pastoral guidance of the children in his care, had spoken of Jock and Tom not as heroes but as ‘good lads’. It was more than Kate could bear.

But in civic terms, today was to be the ‘big one’ – the ceremonial unveiling by Provost Thomson of a 16ft granite obelisk in Dock Park, honouring the lives and heroic deaths of Jock and his old school friend Thomas Mullin. Several hundred people were to attend and Kate would sit with her father and stepmother in the front row, alongside the Provost and in full view of everyone in Dumfries. But two people would be conspicuous by their absence: Jock’s sisters Nellie, twenty-five, and Grace, twenty-one. Both girls had left home and were working away from Dumfries long before Jock died. Nellie had moved out soon after the death of her mother, disgusted by her father’s amorous approaches to Alice. Since Jock’s death, Nellie and Grace’s trips home to Dumfries had become increasingly infrequent as both girls’ relationship with their father and stepmother deteriorated. None of Andrew’s daughters got on with Alice, who accused Grace in particular of being rude, lazy and unhelpful. There were explosive rows and by 1913 Nellie had stopped coming home altogether. Their father had written to both girls telling them that he expected them to attend the ceremony. But they were embarrassed by their father’s unpredictable behaviour and were determined to avoid any confrontations between their father and Mary Costin, whom they knew would be there with Jock’s baby. They sent their apologies.

Andrew Hume had already determined that the youngest member of the family, Andrew, eleven, was too young to be put through another gut-wrenching occasion. That left Kate as her father’s buffer against Mary Costin. It would be the first time in months that Mary and Andrew had met outside a courtroom. Kate was dreading it as her father’s vendetta against the Costins seemed already to have gone beyond hatred into madness.

The design and construction of the memorial itself had not been without controversy. There had been endless debate about what form it should take and a
Titanic
Memorial Committee had been set up to arrive at a democratic decision. One of the city elders, Mr Hiddleston, thought that two granite tablets bearing the young men’s names should be erected in the town hall. Another, Mr Malloch, proposed a granite monument in St Michael’s Cemetery as the lads had no graves in Dumfries, both having been buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Mr Mitchell fought for a drinking fountain in St Michael Street. It was Mr Clark, a baker, who had suggested an obelisk in Dock Park, overlooking the River Nith. This won widespread approval and a sub-committee was appointed to agree a design and raise the necessary funds by sending ‘subscription sheets’ to factories and workshops. A furious row had then ensued over who would design and build the obelisk. A well-known local sculptor, Mr J. W. Dods, made a bid for the contract by joining forces with the building firm, Messrs Stewart of Dumfries. But the draft sketches were deemed to be unsuitable and the proposed costs too high. Other local firms asked to tender took great exception to being told by the sub-committee that their costs were also too high. It soon became a two-horse race between a local firm of builders, Messrs D. H. & J. Newall from Dalbeattie, and a masonry firm from Trafford Park, Manchester, Messrs Kirkpatrick Bros. Both quoted £100 for the job but Kirkpatrick’s tender included the cost of a bronze relief panel with an image of the
Titanic
incorporated into a scroll of music from the hymn, ‘Nearer My God To Thee’. As a goodwill gesture they also threw in some railings around the obelisk to protect it. Kirkpatricks were appointed after a heated debate, the vote of 15-9 in favour causing much ill will among local tradesmen, who vowed to boycott the ceremony. The final insult was Kirkpatricks’ choice of ‘the very best quality of Aberdeen granite’ rather than Dumfries’s own fine stone.

But all these rivalries and grievances were put aside on the morning of 31 May 1913 as hundreds of townspeople gathered in Dock Park in bright sunshine. Andrew and Alice Hume, with a reluctant Kate in tow, walked the half mile from their home in George Street to the park. Flags flew at half mast from the town hall and Midsteeple. Church bells across Dumfries and Maxwelltown tolled solemnly. On the bandstand the band played ‘Nearer My God To Thee’. Two buglers from the 3rd King’s Own Scottish Borderers stood to attention either side of the obelisk waiting to sound the ‘Last Post’. Sixty Scouts formed a double rank between the bowling pavilion and the memorial; the Provosts of Dumfries and Maxwelltown would walk between them before taking their seats, their chains of office jangling on their chests.

To Kate, it was as if Jock had died all over again, except this time she wasn’t numb with shock. More than a year on, she felt her older brother’s loss more keenly than ever and her grief fuelled her fury with her father, whom she blamed more than ever for creating the circumstances that led to Jock’s death.

The Humes took their seats in the front row just before the Provosts arrived in their civic finery, accompanied by the Revd James Strachan who had also officiated at Jock’s memorial service. Revd Strachan led the gathering in prayer and then invited Provost Thomson to unveil the memorial. As the curtain was drawn back, Kate was able to read for the first time the inscription on the base of the obelisk. It said:

IN MEMORY OF

JOHN LAW HUME, A MEMBER OF THE BAND,

AND THOMAS MULLIN, STEWARD,

NATIVES OF THESE TOWNS

WHO LOST THEIR LIVES IN THE WRECK OF

THE WHITE STAR LINER ‘TITANIC’

WHICH SANK IN MID ATLANTIC ON THE

14TH DAY OF APRIL, 1912

THEY DIED AT THE POST OF DUTY.

The Provost thanked everyone for their ‘spontaneous response’ to the appeal to erect the monument. ‘Upon that gallant ship’, he intoned, ‘there were 2,206 human beings – the population of a small town – and of those, 1,500 went to a watery grave . . .’ The buglers sounded the ‘Last Post’ and the band played ‘O God Of Bethel’.

Provost Nicholson then thanked Provost Thomson for his role in creating a memorial that would be ‘a lasting reminder to those who lived in the town . . . and a monument to the greatest disaster in modern times’. Jock’s old headmaster Mr Hendrie thanked the Memorial Committee for ‘keeping green’ the memory of the two young citizens of the burgh. Provost Thomson then sprang to his feet again to propose a vote of thanks to the sculptors and builders for their excellent work. Kate Hume was wondering whether there was anyone left in the world to thank when Provost Thomson leapt up for the third time to thank Captain Wingate of the 3rd King’s Own Scottish Borderers for granting the services of the buglers.

‘The proceedings terminated with the singing of the National Anthem’, the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
reported, ‘and the band thereafter played lively music while the bells pealed forth from the Midsteeple.’

In contrast to the Humes, the entire Costin family turned out for the occasion. Mary came with her mother Susan, her two brothers John (‘Jock’) and Menzies and the eight-month-old Johnann transported in a new Marmet pram, which she had bought using some of the payment from the Relief Fund. They were a proud family and, although not part of the official proceedings, they made their way to the front of the gathering where they were welcomed by friends, including Thomas Mullin’s granny, who made a tremendous fuss of the baby.

Unlike Kate, Mary Costin did not go home sobbing or in a state of great distress. She had felt proud that the people of Dumfries thought so well of Jock and Tom that they deserved a memorial, something permanent, a place that people could visit and understand in a hundred years’ time. The Costins walked home to Buccleuch Street at a gentle pace, making plenty of time for people to stop and admire the baby: Jock’s baby.

22

The Case of the Mutilated Nurse

August 1914

A year later during the summer of 1914, Kate Hume, now an unhappy teenage girl of seventeen, began to consider how she could hurt her father and stepmother. Left alone all day in the offices of Anderson’s Electrical Engineers, where she worked as a clerk, Kate had all the time in the world to consider her grievances and to plan her revenge on Andrew and Alice.

The course of events that Kate set in motion would create an international sensation in the early weeks of the First World War. The ensuing court case, which was widely reported, became known as ‘The Dumfries Atrocity Hoax’. An account of some of the events appeared in a book published at the time entitled
Falsehood in Wartime
by Arthur Ponsonby, MP for Stirling. He referred to it as ‘The Celebrated Case of the Mutilated Nurse’.